Friday, January 30, 2004

I did some cleaning today. I figured I'm going to have to move out of the Stanford web space soon, so I backed things up, deleted almost everything I had there, and put up a new web front. It doesn't go to much. It links to another one of my pages and e's page. From my other page you can go to either of my blogs or my yahoo photo album which includes some self-portraits I tried making this morning.

I think so many of us seek approval. I stumbled upon the asiancuties community on lj. It's basically like are you hot or not where people put pictures up of themselves and others rate how attractive they are. In the case of asiancuties, you are rated on how 'cute' you are. Honestly, I felt and extreme pull to submit. Upon introspection, I think it's due to a feeling of disconnect I sometimes have being Asian American. That problem of 'feeling Asian enough.' I am not the typical cutsey Asian girl. Well I did submit, I don't think I'm going to get in (the votes were close at last count, but the no's were winning :) )

I went on campus for a job interview today. It's with the Stanford Library system to work on fixing up their online library tutorial system (soon to be required for all new students). I think they're looking for someone who has more time to spend this quarter (+10hrs) and who has more javascript experience. We'll see I guess.

our place is a mess right now, which makes it all the more difficult to concentrate on work. earlier this week i decided to drop my interpersonal abnormal psych class so i could have a lighter load. Hopefully I can buckle down and do well this quarter.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

now does this parrot really talk, or was he just trained very very well and can fool enough people? how are we to know if he is actually cognitively recognizing a stimulus and reacting innovatively as opposed to being very well conditioned? perhaps fMRI scans are in order :) not that we know enough about parrot brains to infer which area is the 'free thinking' area if there is such an area (i guess like the frontal lobe in humans?) and not like he'd be able to keep that still in the fMRI machine (plus the noise'd probably freak the hell out of him).

I guess it would be interesting to see if he could teach others. I propose they find this parrot a mate immediately, and see if his children will learn to speak from him as well. dibs on a baby!

Monday, January 26, 2004

why is it that this quarter seems like more work than i can wrap my head around? I think I'm taking fewer classes, and the classes themselves aren't as challenging (in terms of requirements) so am I just lazier? did I take winter break and extend it too much into winter quarter?

some how i slept funny and my neck is killing me every time i lean forward or backward too much.

my scouring of classified ads hasn't turned up a job for me yet. Am i being to snobby about what I do for work for a little extra cash. I thought about retail somewhere i want to shop (major discounts!) but e said retail is miserable and discourages me at each suggestion of it.

since we have no income right now, it worries me when i want to buy a little happiness here and there (ok that's a little frightening, but i mean i hate feeling guilty when i want to buy a candy bar at the grocery store - mmm violet crumble!).

I've also been looking around for stuff I would like to sell. eyeing old textbooks to sell on amazon, old vacuums taking up space in the closet, etc. anything to make a few extra bucks, right? I think there is a fuzzy job fair tomorrow somewhere on campus...

Monday, January 19, 2004

Yesterday for our 1.5 yr anniversary, we went to see The House of Sand and Fog. It wasn't playing too near us because it wasn't picked up by the Century theaters. It was playing at AMC (which we avoid at all costs) and at the Camera Cinemas. We went to Camera 7 in Campbell which which I highly recommend to you all. Before the movie previews, it shows a few ads, but it also showed photography and art slides, and people can submit their art for display before the show. Plus, they allow you to bring food in from Pizza my heart or their cinema cafes (yay to something besides extremely expensive popcorn and candy). They also have student discounts and are located in a center with plenty of other food (i used to go to this shopping center w/ my family and apop). To apop: remember the center where you drove around the circle turnaround repeatedly?

And for the movie, YOU MUST GO SEE IT. apop wrote a synopsis for y'all here at his lj. Be warned to bring tissues and be prepared to be very very sad. It's beautiful though and worth seeing in the theaters. Some points in the movie hit you over the head a little too hard to parallel the stories, but it's forgivable. the bird metaphor is a little too much.

Saturday, January 17, 2004

I can't tell. At first it hit like an allergic reaction in emotions class. I just started sniffling and sneezing like crazy. Then the sinus headaches came, and I was gifted with a cough as though I had taken an expectorant. Am I sick? Am I allergic to something special? boo.

perhaps the practicing on yahoo poker (hold'em aka Celebrity Poker) helped my poker playing. Somehow e and I both managed to get more money than we came with to our poker game last night. Paul of course raked in as well. That means poor Adam woefully emptied his wallet and ended up giving a written I.O.U. to e for $9. His defeator: Frankenstein (an extremely high stakes game. at one point there was $32 in the pot). Actually, what worked for me was keeping track of my money, and not betting wildly on chances. e and I still are way down out of all our nights of poker/mahjong playing, but last night inched us up the pit.

Monk was also recorded on Paulie and Adam's TiVo. I to watch it. It's new! We didn't get a chance to because of poker. There was fun S'Mores making though in their fire place. Paulie was particularly impressed by his fire in the fireplace having never experienced a fireplace in Hawaii.

we're celebrating e's bday tonight because our friends don't NEED get MLK off, although Stanford gave us the day off.

gotta read. gotta sleep. went to bed at 6am woke up at 10:30am. Damn internal clocks. hopefully i will take a nap midafternoon.

Look I got new comments! HaloScan graciously picked up the blogSpeak users so our old comments are saved as well! Yay haloscan.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

i'll put a different comment engine thing up soon. blah. i've been trying to put a new ringtone on my phone (nokia 6200). I'm very disappointed in the quality of the ones I found so far. They all sound too synthesized. I don't even know how many polyphonic keys my phone is capable of playing at the same time, but i'd wager it's not too high. I really want to get a phone with true tones, but I'm not quite sure if they're out in the US yet, or if AT&T sells them.

Haven't been getting much reading done, although I did start playing yahoo poker to practice (e and i tend to lose too much money when we play for real). Unfortunately, when people aren't playing w/real money, the betting is so arbitrary. People make no sense when they keep raising and raising until the pot is at $70 before seeing the river (in hold'em). lame asses.

I have an interview tomorrow morning for a campus job. I hope it's not too involved, I just need the extra cash. We'll see.

Monday, January 12, 2004

as e mentioned to me, i have no comments currently on the page. Explanation from blogspeak site, "BlogSpeak is currently down because the bastards that host it decided to suspend my account. I do not know as of yet when this situation will be resolved. If you don't want any JavaScript errors on your pages, take the code off for the time being. Thanks for your patience."

sigh, so I might have to take a look at some other comment providers. not so bad i guess.

I've been searching for a part-time job either on campus or somewhere along our home-school route. e may not be working at ea this quarter so i need to help bring in some dough. I have a meeting with the engineering dept someone for some sort of job there. We'll see. I struggled with the fax machine in the psych building to send my resume to some elusive fax number for some digital imaging job ($20/hr!) we'll see if i get a response.

i realized my schedule is not horribly full. my main full day is thursday. i guess that means i have no excuse for not getting my work done.

spoke with Val about possible RA ships in the department, she gave me some leads to follow up on in late february. Found out that psych full time RAs make something like 30,000 a yr which is better than i thought. I need to try to get myself one of those positions.

need to kick my butt to work on honors.

oh i have to keep an emotion journal for 2 weeks for my emotions class. so this blog may become more emotion heavy at some point :)

did i mention the VS semi-annual sale was fabulous? This was the first year I got to go to the sale early on, before all the good bras were picked away, and while a majority of the sizes were still organized into the correct bins. I also bought a new swim suit off the website for next summer (who can resist a good sale? not me, that's for sure)

Val has been raving about the candied walnuts I gifted to her for the holidays. Apparently, the famous C. Steele also had a tasty, but Val wouldn't give up more of her nuts. Since he's on a nut kick, maybe I should make him up a batch to gain more major advice time...

Lucky e and I had a big surprise when we opened the energy bill yesterday. Apparently our energy usage had a bizillion % jump, and costs went from $5 to $300 something! Apparently PG&E had made our little energy reader invalid, so all previous readings had been rejected (hence the charge of the minimal amount of energy possible before this), now they had fixed the problem, but the energy read was a read of all the energy since the meter had been inactivated (which might have been way before we got to our apartment). The company is fixing things, but it'll will take a couple months still. oh blah company! at least we don't have to pay anything while the bill is being readjusted.

e says harvard is better than stanford at everything, but he admits since he's never gone to school there, it could all be a bold-faced lie.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

e and i were jealous when we turned on animal planet the other night. there were these cute cute guinea pigs loving being held in their owners' arms. skeeter is speed lightning when we even walk near his cage. I gave him a stuffed penguin to have as a friend. he dragged mr. penguin down into his cardboard house. e suggested that they were doing the nasty.

classes argh... my schedule is flipping like a tiddly wink. i went to computer interfaces today w/ e and nickchan. Looks like alot of fun, I'm a little intimidated about the project. I feel like we have to do something amazing to actually make a valuable contribution to the world. that's so intense, but exciting at the same time.
I shopped Zimbardo's new class on human nature (cults, sex, and terrorism). honestly, the class looked ok. "the legendary zimbardo" (as noted on every one of his slides) has decreed that freshman oriented projects are required. For instance, one of the projects calls for organizing a terrorist cell in your dorm. other projects involve hightailing it out to SF to explore Scientology or a dinner date with The Moonies. I do think I will audit some of the lectures. They are having several good guest lecturers. They're bringing in a panelist of a long time prostitute, a professional dominatrix, and a male porn star. Another guest will be the sex columnist from the Guardian. The whole second hour with her will be spent answering all of the questions sent in by students (i think it's required to write a question).

I also shopped Human Abilities tonight. the class seems okay, not too difficult, but also not exciting enough to drag me from home at 6pm to 8pm twice a week.

I've also realized I've been extroadinarily chatty for the past several days (at least for me). I guess that's natural when you get back to school. everyone is always interested in the chit chat. Still talking to random people I sit near in my classes isn't normal for me, but it has felt a little natural lately. weird eh?

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Hot Topic has a pretty good online website. all their models look very goth or punk (not that I'm surprised). I went w/ my parents into hot topic over vacation. Much to my bro and my own embarrassment, my dad walks in, stares at the store clerks and exclaims in shock and dissapproval something about how weird it is that everyone has all these body piercings.

e: don't go to the website, i don't want you to for gifty reasons right now. maybe in a month.

oh for all those who care, e's bday is coming up on the 20th.

blah. school has started again. e has a 9am class TTh, so I'm attending a class at 9:30am. I think it might require too much participation for that early in the morning. I felt absolutely brain dead in class.

Victoria's Secret Semi-Annual Sale started yesterday! I'm so excited, I've got to go there after school today to get some cute new stuffs. I want to order a swimsuit from the website too (it's cute AND on sale). yay cute underthings!

still need to find a job, got to stop by the photo lab to see if i can do a little something something there. oh money.

i made an extra special trip up to the parents to bring back my stair climber. I put it together yesterday and started huffing and puffing to law and order. hopefully i keep exercising a little each day to strip the pounds off.

caught the beginning of an x-files w/ some freaky bleeding neck ghost girl. that kept me up way to long in a paranoid state. next time i'll switch the channel